Photo: Tristram Kenton
This is a haunted as well as a haunting play: it is stalked, for those of a certain generation, by memories of Gielgud and Richardson in the original 1975 production. But the brilliant thing about Harold Pinter's revival of his own play is that, without banishing the ghosts, it forces us to re-examine what the work is actually about.
As Patrick Marber writes in the programme, the play is never fully knowable. But what Pinter's production clearly presents us with is a collision between two different forms of desperation.
Hirst, the wealthy writer, within whose luxurious drawing room the action takes place, is not merely trapped in the present but plagued by inconsolable memories of the past.
The tragedy of Spooner, the ageing Chalk Farm pub worker who seeks to rescue him, is that he has no definable past but only a series of self-invented myths. Either way, Pinter implies, we are the victims of our memories.
But the play is a poem, not a thesis: the great thing about it is the way it is defined by its performers and here Corin Redgrave and John Wood prove an astonishing match for past interpreters. What is remarkable about Redgrave's Hirst is not merely the contrast between the legless night-drinker and the spruce morning after figure - Pinter himself caught that in the 1992 Almeida revival - but the intensity of both his rage and compassion.
In his cups Redgrave becomes a demonic figure as if trying to lay the ghosts of his remembrance; but he later lends the speech where Hirst urges Spooner to "tender the dead as you would yourself be tendered" a grave and quiet beauty.
If Redgrave's Hirst is forever haunted by the past, Wood's amazing Spooner is constantly seeking to create one. Far more clearly than Gielgud, he shows us that Spooner is the superfluous man trying to find his mission in life: to that end he creates a series of elaborate fantasies. One of them is that he is a poet so that when Wood describes golden versifying evenings at his country house, his eyes glaze over.
A born fantasist, Wood also enters into other people's dreams: there's a great moment when he stares in astonishment at Hirst's description of their Oxford past before entering enthusiastically into the game. But Wood also beautifully suggests there is something quixotically chivalric about Spooner's final attempt to rescue Hirst from a doomed stasis.
As Hirst's two sexually interlocked servants, Andy de la Tour is a brutally protective Briggs and Danny Dyer a fly, charm-exploiting Foster. Like Eileen Diss's expensively stark design, they add to a rich evening in which Pinter memorably shows how the past, in theatre as in life, is fixed and fluid at the same time.
In rep. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
